Manufacturing Talk Radio, a podcast launched on November 4, 2013, has reached its tenth broadcasting anniversary as the most-viewed manufacturing podcast.
The podcast has 5,000 to 25,000 views per episode on YouTube, plus thousands of additional listeners on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, iHeartRadio, and many other podcast apps. The talk show format is geared to all executive and employee levels within manufacturing, including supply chain partners and customers of the more than 600,000 manufacturers across the United States. The weekly podcast is also popular in many other countries as the voice of manufacturing globally.
“When we launched Manufacturing Talk Radio, it was a marketing tool to help promote sponsors of the show,” said Lewis A. Weiss, founder of the podcast. “All Metals & Forge Group was the first sponsor and remains a sponsor today. But the podcast took on a life of its own as notable people from the industry, academia, federal, state, and local elected officials, and directors of industry associations began to take notice and appear as guests on the show. One of its key attributes is that it is not a ‘gotcha’ interview. It is a friendly conversation to help people in the myriad of manufacturing positions make more informed decisions and keep pace with an industry filled with digital disruption and rapid evolution.”
When the Manufacturing Talk Radio podcast launched, its first guest was Brad Holcomb, committee chair for the Institute of Supply Management’s Manufacturing Report on Business®. He went beyond the headline Purchasing Manager’s Index number and shared ISM’s understanding of the subindexes that make up that top-line figure. The manufacturing subindexes are new orders, production, employment, supplier deliveries, and inventories in production plants. Each month, ISM continues to present in-depth discussion of the Manufacturing Report on Business with Tim Fiore, the Service Report on Business ® with Anthony Nieves, and the Semi-Annual Forecast released in May and December. The ISM Manufacturing and Services Indexes are a monthly gauge of the level of economic activity in the U.S. manufacturing and services sectors versus the previous month.
“The detail in the subindexes gives manufacturers and service providers a good read on the recent past ebb and flow of the industry as a whole, and their sector in particular, and has proved to be a potential forecasting tool when the data is compared to previous expansion and recession cycles,” said Weiss. “We are grateful to the ISM for their continued involvement with us over this exciting 10-year growth period.
“Our mission has been, and continues to be, to share information that manufacturers and service companies can use to add to discussions within their own operations to make better-informed decisions,” said Weiss. “While we have fun doing it, with some occasional levity in our discussions with guests, we are intensely careful to convey accurate and reliable information without political positions overriding reason. Manufacturing does not like uncertainty, and we are in an unfortunate cycle of much uncertainty, caught between forecasts or recession and expansion, inflation and high employment, inverted bond yields and consumer uncertainty, and other factors that make 2023 and 2024 a kaleidoscope of unpredictable possibilities. This is why we continue to produce the Manufacturing Talk Radio Podcast and its more specialized podcasts, including The Flagship Report with noted economist Dr. Chris Kuehl, Manufacturing Think Tank with Cliff Waldman, Moser on Manufacturing with Harry Mosser on Reshoring, and Hazard Girls with Emily Soloby and women discussing their roles in non-tradition fields,” he said.
“To further enhance the message, we also publish a free monthly ezine called Manufacturing Outlook that dovetails with Manufacturing Talk Radio by discussing the outlook for various manufacturing sectors, and how economies around the world are performing, since imports and exports are a major component of the GDP of many countries. Between Manufacturing Talk Radio and Manufacturing Outlook, we present information that can be used worldwide,” said Weiss, who is also the publisher of Manufacturing Outlook.
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